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Ivonne Yáñez (b. 1991 in Mexico City, Mexico; lives and works in Minneapolis, MN) is a Mexican multidisciplinary artist and educator. Her practice explores memory, displacement, and the ways we construct ideas of home and belonging. Working across soft sculpture, installation, painting, and ceramics, she draws from materials embedded in domestic life and incorporates traditional craft techniques from Mexico, using softness to reconsider ideas of permanence and vulnerability.
Yáñez has presented selected solo exhibitions at Rochester Art Center (Rochester, MN), SooVAC (Minneapolis, MN), Museo Sebastián (Chihuahua, Mexico), and San Luis Contemporáneo (Ciudad Juárez, Mexico), with group exhibitions at venues including Franconia Sculpture Park (Shafer, MN) and Gallery 263 (Cambridge, MA). Her work has been shown across the United States and Mexico.
Alongside her studio practice, Yáñez is an active educator in the Twin Cities. She has been Adjunct Faculty at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (MCAD) since 2023, and works as an educator at the Walker Art Center, where she develops accessible and bilingual programming in English and Spanish. Her teaching and community-based work are grounded in the belief that making is a way of thinking, and that materials can serve as sites for cultural, historical, and personal inquiry.
Yáñez holds an MFA in Visual Studies with a focus on Fiber and Installation from MCAD, as well as degrees in Fashion Design from Universidad del Valle de México and Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti in Milan. She maintains an active studio practice at Public Functionary in Minneapolis.
My practice explores memory as a space where personal experience, cultural imagery, and inherited narratives are continuously reconstructed. Working across soft sculpture, textiles, installation, painting, ceramics, and art garments, I create objects and environments that emerge from the fragments of remembered places, bodies, rituals, and visual traditions. Rather than treating memory as a fixed record of the past, I approach it as a fluid material through which new imaginaries can be constructed.
Materials are central to this process. Textiles, thread, clothing, clay, and found objects carry associations with the body, domestic life, labor, and cultural transmission. Through sewing, weaving, embroidery, construction, molding, and assemblage, I transform these materials into sculptural forms that occupy an uncertain space between object, garment, body, and image. The physical processes of making, assembling, stitching, layering, stretching, shaping, and repairing, become ways of translating memory into material form.
My work draws from Mexican visual culture, popular imagery, ritual practices, and everyday objects, while allowing these references to shift through personal recollection and contemporary experience. I am interested in how cultural images are remembered, altered, and carried across places and generations. Familiar symbols and forms become points of departure for constructing an imaginative landscape where memory and invention overlap.
Through this material and visual language, I consider displacement, corporeality, belonging, and the ways memory shapes our relationship to place and identity. My sculptures and installations often take on a bodily presence, suggesting garments, figures, domestic objects, or fragmented architectures. They exist as both tangible objects and containers for stories,holding traces of what has been remembered, transformed, lost, and imagined.
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